Science and Fiction in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

摘要

In 1943, long before his intervention in the two cultures controversy between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling published an essay on E.M. Forster's first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread in which he offered a comparison of the methods of the scientist and the writer of fiction. In defence of Forster's melodramatic plots, from which, Trilling suggests, "contemporary taste draws back, insisting that life is not like that," he writes that